


Flower and Serpent

by ecphrasis



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage, Discussion of Abortion, Dystopia, F/M, Fisher King, Gender Roles, LACE is more Custom and less Law, Linguistic Imperialism, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:20:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29303349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecphrasis/pseuds/ecphrasis
Summary: A few centuries after the War of Wrath, the beautiful, skilled Annatar travels to Ossiriand, to the Court of High King Gil-Galad, who is sickened by a terrible wound. Annatar brings extraordinary scientific advancement and arcane knowledge, and he turns Ossiriand from the landing-place of the Noldor in exile into a thriving empire, ravenous for territory. Lindon’s increasing bellicosity leads to tensions with its elven allies.When Celebrían, the daughter of the fallen Eregion’s rulers, arrives in Lindon as the chosen bride of Elrond of Imladris, she quickly learns that not everything is as it seems. A shadow darkens all the Westlands, a malice stirs in the east, and the inchoate authority of the High King has begun to permeate every facet of his people’s lives. The gifts of Annatar are not without their price.With unlikely allies, Celebrían must attempt to navigate a world turned sour, all while she grows closer to her distant, tormented husband.
Relationships: Celebrían/Elrond Peredhel
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	Flower and Serpent

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote this a couple months ago and recently discovered it and decided I did actually like it, so here you go. I am in desperate need of validation because I am neck-deep in writing my (probably?) terrible thesis, so please, validate me. 
> 
> Please note that for the use of Quenya and Sindarin, I am drawing exclusively from ambar-eldaron.com’s Quenya and Sindarin dictionaries. The linguistic imperialism present in Gil-Galad’s Court is heavily inspired by Francoist Spain and the Canadian residential school system. The isolation of Noldorin women is drawn from the Mughal practice of keeping pudah. The idea of gold and silver machines comes from Homer’s Odyssey. The image of the Fisher-King comes from numerous Arthurian legends, but is most clearly borrowed from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. Obviously this whole story is not so secretly Macbeth.

The dim grey of the hour of dawn greets her when she opens her eyes. The sound of the salt sea and the faint moan of the wind mingle with the even breaths of the man beside her, and she shifts, uncomfortably aware of the tacky blood between her thighs. Her body aches in ways new to her, and her skin flushes when she considers the way he had moved above her the previous night. She had had no mother to prepare her for her wedding night; they had enjoyed no courtship designed to gradually introduce each other to the pleasures of their bodies. She bites her lip against the discomfort between her legs.

Her husband’s eyes snap open, and his pupils, the color of mountain-slate, cold as winter, fix their gaze on her. Some emotion washes over his stern features, the way a loose wave slinks up a beach of slate and vanishes amongst the uneven stones. She cannot read him in the faint light. She thinks even under a noonday sun she would struggle to parse the way his visage shifts. He is as unknown to her as the strange land of Ossiriand itself.

“Celebrían,” he whispers, so softly that she can barely hear her name over the sound of her own breath.

When she wed him yesterday, he called her Telepsanna, her name transliterated into Quenya. She swore her oath to him in her mother’s language, and she swore fealty to his king under a patronymic she had never uttered before. Telpsanna Telporniel she had named herself, in keeping with the new custom of the High King’s Court. She is young, but even she remembers speaking with the King in Sindarin. When they had first met, a yen past, he had greeted her as Celeborn’s daughter, and he had blessed her in Elbereth’s name, not Varda’s. Still, a yen past he and her parents had been firm allies against the darkness, and there had been no proscription against the speaking of Sindarin. 

Slowly, the way a man approaches a half-broken horse, her husband brings his hand to her shoulder and brushes aside a strand of her bright silver hair. He cannot be oblivious to the way her heart jumps in her chest. She is his now, his to manage, his to possess. Under the auspices of a Sindarin marriage, she would have retained the right of annulment, of refusal, of property. Noldorin oaths afford no such freedom to the bride.

“Good morning,” he says. He speaks in neither Quenya nor in Sindarin, but in the bastardized creole of the merchant-mercenaries. He has the King’s favor, he is free to disobey his edicts. Ceuranar was stripped and beaten bloody for simply reciting the poetry of Hâdh, and Celebrían has no desire to experience her kinsman’s punishment.

“Good morning, my lord,” she says, softly, in Quenya. He withdraws his hand from her shoulder.

“Did you rest well?” He asks, and this time he reverts to the language of Gil-Galad’s court. He speaks Quenya fluidly, beautifully, and she knows he has no need to affect the ancient tones of Valinor. Raised by Maedhros and Maglor, he speaks the undefiled language of the First High King as his first tongue. Even Gil-Galad had to train himself to speak in Finwë’s dialect. Or, rather, her mother had trained him, as a kindness.

“Yes Lord,” she says. “I rested very well.” He nods once, tersely, and sits upright. The bedclothes fall to reveal his back, scarred and battle-hardened, suntanned the color of worn leather.

“I hope this will be a profitable arrangement for the both of us, Celebrían.” Even though he speaks Quenya, he uses her Sindarin name. She does not respond. Her name is forbidden, surely he must know this. Gil-Galad’s edict is iron-fisted, the punishment for speaking a language other than divinely ordained Quenya is brutal. 

“I am my lord’s servant,” she responds, evenly. 

“My household is smaller than is normal for a lord of my stature,” he says. He won’t look at her when he talks to her; he stares steadfastly over her shoulder. “I am a warrior, as you know, and I occupy my holding in the foothills of the Hithaeglir only infrequently. I think you will find management of my possessions to be a light burden. I have asked Erestor, my kinsman and the Master of my Household, to give you whatever aid you require. The Court seamstresses to prepare you clothes appropriate to your station, and you must ornament yourself as you see fit, and choose such jewels from my coffers as complement your natural beauty.” In another’s mouth, perhaps, she would understand his works as flattery, but he speaks blandly, almost disinterestedly.

Had he been so disinterested when he touched her the previous night? She cannot remember, cannot picture his face. It had been dark, after all, and he had plied her with alcohol. He had told her if only she lay still he would accomplish their duty, and he had, rutting between her legs with all the diligence of a draught ox pulling a plough. He had seemed to derive almost as little pleasure from the experience as she herself did, but he had not been cruel. He might have been. She had been afraid of him, a kinsman she did not know, a commander of the army that had more and more frequently set itself against her parents’ borders. 

“Thank you Lord,” she says. The War Lord of the East acknowledges this courtesy with a slight inflection of his head.

He rises, and shrugs a robe around his shoulders. It is the costly silver accented in blue, argent and azure, the chosen colors of his standard.

Her mother had suggested him to her as a husband, before the hostilities with the High King came to a forefront. He was her kinsman after all, on both her mother and her father’s sides, and he was destined by blood and nature for excellence. 

He stands tall, even for an elf, and he is comely when dressed in all the finery of Gil-Galad’s court. His beauty is more delicate with his hair loose and his clothes unornamented. 

Her bedchamber is warmed by a single fireplace, and he stokes the coals to fresh brightness, and from her bed she hears the sound of a pestle scraping the marble bottom of a mortar. Next comes the smell of bitter herbs in boiling water, and then a warm cup half-filled with liquid is pressed into her frigid hands.

“What is it?” She asks, although she can guess. She has heard that he is a healer as well as a soldier, and undoubtedly he knows ways to make women conceive.

“An abortifacient,” he says. As if to twist the knife more deeply into her heart, he says it in Sindarin. Then again, she does not know the word for what it is in Quenya. Perhaps no such word exists.

“I will be beaten if I am discovered. I might be hanged.”

“You will not be.” His voice is steady, uncompromising. “I will let nothing happen to you, I swear it on my ancestors and yours. Drink.” She drinks. It is bitter, and the taste lingers long after she drains the last drop.  
____________________

When the dawn sun breaks over the horizon and turns the scattered grey clouds the color of fresh-spilled blood, a gentle knock against her chamber door stirs her from her mindless stupor. Her husband’s side of her bed is vacant. When her maidservant enters her room, Celebrían can see that she poorly attempts to hide her surprise at her lord’s absence.

“Good morning, Lady Telpsanna,” the girl says, in sickly-sweet Quenya. She is Celebrían’s age, perhaps, young and very, very pretty. Her hair is hidden behind a waterfall of dark blue silk, the color of her husband’s household.

“Good morning,” Celebrían says, her voice a whisper of its usual strength. It is Lady Telpsanna’s voice, not her own. 

“I’ve run a bath for you, my lady, and laid out a selection of dresses. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with your preferences.”

“I have none,” Celebrían says. “I am certain you will have chosen wisely.” The girl flushes a shade of red, pretty, innocent. Celebrían is young to be married, the girl is younger still, but Celebrían can see by the slight curve of her body that she is in the very early stages of pregnancy. The Noldor are to bring forth children after the manner of their ancestors, according to the latest of Gil-Galad’s edicts. Decoctions designed to limit conception are banned under penalty of the severest punishment, and husbands are encouraged to take their rights often, to ensure their wives are fruitful. Gil-Galad cannot form an army out of mud like the Enemy can, and so he is reduced to more common means. There are subsidies for rearing children. Men who sire multiple sons are more readily promoted in Gil-Galad’s Court. Unwed men are all but barred from advancement.

Gil-Galad himself is unwed, and has no mistress or concubine. The rumors surrounding this, if heard from anyone’s mouth, could lead to the kinds of punishment that no High King would formerly have condoned.

In her parents’ kingdom, women held sway, and her mother ruled as her father’s equal. After marriage, Noldorin women are expected to shroud their hair with opaque veils. The conservative nature of Gil-Galad’s court means that some women conceal their faces behind dark silk as well, and move through the living stone of Lindon as noiselessly as spirits, wrapped in layers of fabric like the newly dead. When her maidservant drapes her in the heavy cloth of a married woman, Celebrían has to bite her tongue to keep from crying out at the constriction of the veil. She was raised in the holly forests of Eregion, until only a few weeks ago, she was accustomed to feel the wind’s bite against her fair skin. The veil stirs only with her exhalations.

“We of the Lord’s household are gladdened by your presence, Lady,” the woman says. Celebrían should know the name of her own maidservant, but she has met so many Noldorin elves since she was brought to Lindon, and she cannot recall it from the fog that settles heavy in her mind.

“Thank you,” she says. 

“Dressed properly, with your hair hidden, you look just like a Noldorin bride,” the woman says. Celebrían knows she means it kindly. She knows it would be better for her husband if all of the High King’s Court would forget, as swiftly as possible, that he has married into the bloodline of traitors. Certainly he had been under no obligation to marry her. The King could have committed her to Nienna’s service, mute and barren, or he could have put her under a ban and sent her eastward to meet her doom at the hands of creatures even crueler than Kinslayers. If he wished, her husband might have taken her for his concubine, and not his wife. She should be grateful he was willing to make her his. She should tremble at the impurity of her blood.

She has never been ashamed of her ancestry.

“Thank you,” she says, in Telpsanna’s voice. 

________________________

Silk, satin, lace, muslin, stoat, marmot, wolf, bear, leather, feathers, furs, and fabric swirl across her body and her field of vision. She stands at the center of all the commotion, her heart in her toes, her blood all but frozen. They will make veils for her out of fabric costlier than anything that she has ever owned. They will bedeck her body with the finest shackles in the world.

She should be grateful. She is a bride and not a harlot, she is a lady, and not a concubine. The King believed she deserved far worse than Elrond’s leniency. She might have been slain by now, if not for his mercy.

“The dresses will easily let out when you conceive, Lady Telpsanna.” 

Celebrían tastes in palimpsest the acrid tang of the decoction. Even in Eregion it was an open secret that Gil-Galad intended to adopt her husband, and make him his heir in deed as well as word. But no man can inherit anything without children of his own, and Gil-Galad’s rules do not bend, even for his most loyal subjects. 

What are the reasons a man of her husband’s stature would not want children? Perhaps he fears the growing shadow. Certainly that moved many of her parents’ people to inhibit conception. But no darkness has touched Ossiriand, at least no darkness of the Enemy’s making. Perhaps he does not wish her to bear his sons. But why would he have chosen her for his wife, out of all the women in the realm of seven rivers?

Perhaps he disagrees with the king.

____________________

The mechanisms of gold and silver glide sinuously along their metal tracks, ferrying goods from one part of the vast palace complex to the other. They start and stop seemingly of their own will, they move as though gifted eyes, they hurry past her as noiselessly as any veiled woman.

“A wonder is it not, Kinswoman?” Celebrían startles. The deep, sea-blue eyes of her father’s cousin arrest her in her aimless wondering.

“Lord Círdan,” she murmurs, uncertain if she is still permitted to name him Gwanur, now that she is no longer a girl.

“I have been given another name, same as you,” Círdan says. His gaze is kind, but Celebrían knows a storm in the old mariner’s eyes when she sees one. “I try to use it at Gil-Galad’s court, out of respect for my closest ally’s edicts.”

“I did not know you were here.” The old shipbuilder hums contemplatively.

“Your husband asked me here to witness your union. I would have stood in your father’s placee, but those with Sindarin blood are not permitted to act in official capacities under the new laws. Your husband begged the King’s indulgence, but another voice prevailed.”

“Whose?” Her word is whisper soft. Círdan nods towards the rolling gold machine that has somehow stilled as if to listen to their conversation.

“Even the tongueless have voices in Lindon, these days,” Círdan says. “You would do well to walk always with an escort.”

“My husband has not ordered me-”

“Telpsanna,” Círdan says. His tone is monitory, it carries the full weight of the old man’s terror. “You would do well to walk always with an escort. Your husband’s Master of Household can establish a guard for you, if he has not already done so. Let me escort you back to your chambers.” He takes her arm in his, and Celebrían is struck by the slightness of his body. He wears no sword at his hip.

“The sea air is not good for women who wish to conceive,” Círdan says, conversationally, as a silver beast tears past them. “You would do well to encourage your lord to take you to his holding.”

“At least I have kinfolk here,” she says, softly. Círdan shakes his head, only the slightest of motions.

“The mountain air would be better for you. It is known to bring health to women, especially those who hope to bear sons.”

“Do you know what happened to Eregion?” She murmurs. The old man nods towards another trundling machine. She does not know whether he means to implicate it, somehow, in her country’s destruction, or whether he merely means to warn her of its presence.

_________________________

When he comes to her, it is past moonrise. His lips touch hers gently, the way a warm breeze draws its fingers over bare skin. They are husband and wife, what he does is no evil. It is a great joy for a man and a woman to be together as one, she knows this.

“Celebrían,” he murmurs, his voice gentle.

“My lord-” she says.

“Elrond,” he says. Not Elërondó, his name in Quenya, but Elrond, Sindarin.

“My lord,” she says.

“Elrond,” he says again. “You do not need to be afraid, Celebrían.”

“My lord, I am afraid.”

“There is no cause to be,” he says. He presses his lips against hers, and she opens her mouth to his and allows him to taste her.

He is comely when arrayed in courtly splendor. He is lovely without the trappings of the Noldorin nobility. She owes him a debt she cannot repay.

“Celebrían,” he murmurs. Her name is honey on his tongue. Her mother often suggested his name when their conversation turned to who among the elven lords she ought to wed. Her mother said he was a good man, decent, generous, and her kin from both her mother and her father’s sides. 

“The king has named me Telpsanna,” she says. Her husband lays his lips against her neck, and she trembles at the chills that flood her body. Hadn’t her maidservants in Eregion whispered about the pleasure their loves brought them? Why shouldn’t she know the same, with tall, dark-haired, grey-eyed, comely Elrond, Elrond who her mother had often mentioned would make a good husband.

“I am not the king,” he murmurs. The dark undercurrent of his voice suggests that perhaps this displeases him, and she cannot stop herself from trembling. Unexpectedly, he brings his lips to her ear, and he murmurs something soft in Sindarin. “There are spies everywhere, spies of eyes and spies of ears and spies of thoughts. We must live in pantomime when we are being watched.”

He thrusts against her as though to move inside her, but it is all for show. She thinks of some stranger, or some golden machine, observing them from the darkness, and she bites her lip.

“He expects me to be fond of you,” he says. “He thinks he knows how to understand me. I must call you by your name in his hearing, to confirm what he expects.”

“What of the drink you gave me?” She whispers back, just as softly. He mimes moving above her, his gaze fixed on her left ear.

“The hour before dawn is safest. We can speak freely then, and move freely. Liminal times disrupt him.”

“But Gil-Galad-” she murmurs, and he shakes his head.

“Not the King, Celebrían. Annatar.”


End file.
